


May Death Never Stop You

by Aranhin



Category: The Secret World, secret world legends
Genre: Death, Gen, dying, look the fic is about the impermanence of death, suicide kinda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-08
Updated: 2018-01-08
Packaged: 2019-03-01 23:40:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13305789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aranhin/pseuds/Aranhin
Summary: Bees die a lot.Written for the Apiary Art Contest.





	May Death Never Stop You

The first time had hurt. Blinding pain, white hot oblivion, screaming until consciousness evaporated.

The second time had hurt. And the third. The fourth.

All of the times hurt - every time bleeding out on the pavement, or crushed by giant eldritch fists, or shot full of bullets. A sea of pain hot and bright, foggy and dark. Each new time brings a new gamut of agony, a new spike of adrenaline-panic, or blind terror, or shrieking desperation. Again and again and again, pain, then foggy darkness, then anima-bright gasps. Choking back to consciousness like a splash of cold water to the face and lungs.

Immortality doesn't curb the agony.

 

* * *

  


After the first month, Rhiannon resigns herself to it - her death is inevitable. It will hurt. She will die and come back and die again, in some new and frequently absurd way, and it will hurt like nothing she has experienced before. She'll float through the anima until she finds her body, and then she'll start the whole process over again.

She becomes resigned to it, and the pain stops meaning anything. It is, and she is, and her death is. It's inevitable, her death exists in mythic time - it has happened, and it will happen, and in all likelihood it is happening right now.

And when she isn't getting dragged around by the friends she makes; when she has quiet moments to herself, she wonders how much of her she is anymore - how much comes back each time she dies. She wonders what life means, if death loses meaning.

 

* * *

 

She comes to in the anima well, laying on her back and staring up at - what? - cloudy skies, a soft drizzle of rain fizzling on the anima-barrier, an edge of rock to one side jutting halfway into the sky. It takes a moment longer for Rhii to place where she is, but as she lays there staring up at soft rain clouds, she remembers.

In the past. They'd gotten as far as the last large monster - the Wayeb-Xul Demon Hound - and Rhii had already died.... At least three times. Once getting beaten to death by a hurricane of rocks and dirt and magic, and once clawed to death by baby ak'ab, and once to an explosive carpet-bombing of blood that she was fairly certain she was out of but _apparently not_.

And just now, the hound had stunned her and her friends, and blinded them, and when she could move again she threw herself in the direction that she had _thought_ had been away from the hound, but had turned out to be _directly underneath the creature's lumbering feet_.

Her phone buzzes in her pocket. She has long since stopped wondering how her phone rematerializes with her - not to mention how it gets service in the most absurd of places, _such as the fucking past_ \- and instead just checks the message.

_Grace: I can't heal that._  

She stares at the message for a moment, knowing full-well that the woman means it semi-jokingly, but still she texts back _Sorry_ , and then tucks the Templar issue flip phone back into her pocket.

Getting crushed to death by the feet of a giant demon hound is unpleasant, to say the least, but there's nothing she can do about it now - nothing she can do to help her friends unless each and every one of them dies - so she finds the best vantage point in the anima well and watches the fight.

 

* * *

 

She opens her eyes in the well, staring up at broken concrete and the sky beyond, and she can hear the roars of the Lurker below. She'd been crushed again, she was pretty sure - crushed by one of the giant creature's huge fists. It had hurt, but it had been quick. The worst part now was that she was still sore - psychically sore, if not physically, given that pain didn't exactly transfer through the anima once one passed back into it upon their death.

Osterby is sitting nearby, turning his deer-skull mask over in his hands as he glances toward the arena periodically. He hadn't been healing this time and had somehow managed to get caught in a fist even sooner than she had - which was almost impressive.

Rhiannon lays still for a moment watching him, and then sits up herself. She has nothing to stim with but her phone, so she pulls it out and fidgets with it, playing the same demo of tetris that came with the phone.

Finally, as a rolling wave of black filth spreads across the square below them and dissipates, Osterby says,

"You die as much as I do." He glances up from his mask a second after saying it, looking to her instead of out at the arena.

She nods.

"Templar, huh?"

A smile quirks across her face, and she nods again.

Osterby laughs, more to himself, it sounds like, than to her - but there's something reassuring about the sound anyways. Any tension that may have existed there breaks, and together they watch the fight below them, either waiting for the Lurker to drop or for their team to drop and join them up in the well.

 

* * *

 

Rhiannon is dressing in what used to be a gym locker room in Kaidan, the door barred against intruders, when she looks up into one of the full length mirrors. She'd come in to use the the showers - with pilfered soap and shampoo and a scrap of something for a washcloth - and after checking each nook and cranny for any sort of monsters, had done just that.

There's nothing quite like a long hot shower to make one feel human again - that and a night's rest in a real bed somewhere safe. And when the filth and dirt and grime is scrubbed away, and hair clean, she wipes the condensation off of her glasses first, and then begins to dress.

She gets as far as her underwear when she catches sight of herself in the mirror. For a moment she thinks it's a ghost - a pale figure in a room swathed in shadow. It is by the barest second that she avoids hurling blood or lightning at the mirror, and it takes another few moments and several deep breaths to bring herself back to baseline.

It's strange to see herself like this, mostly naked in a dark gym bathroom, wet and without defences. Strange to see so much skin at once, all smooth and (mostly) unblemished. For a moment she thinks - this body cannot possibly be hers. With all the deaths, all the injury and accident. Axe wounds. Burns. Broken bones. But the only scars are those from when she was younger. From before the bee.

Even from many feet away, she can see the neat surgical scar from when she'd had her appendix out at age six. The messier scar on her chin from falling off her bike at age nine. Closer, she can see small ones on her face - an acne scar, hidden amongst freckles, a small white line from a cat scratch. Beyond her face there are more, small things from living life the way regular people did.

Regular people, who didn't spend their time dying repeatedly and hiding in bathrooms from filth monsters in an apocalyptic nightmare land.

She has time to think - how strange this new life of hers is - and then there's a bone-shaking roar from outside the locker room, and the doors are rattling, and she only has time to hope that the plank she used to bar the door will hold until she's dressed again.

There's no more time for introspection. There's never any time.

 

* * *

 

She's laying curled on the floor of Maeve's tiny apartment in a penguin onesie and wrapped in a heavy blanket and trying not to yawn terribly much, when someone says,

"I died four times yesterday."

It's Mooney - the new bee that Yumi found somewhere - and while she's not talked to him a whole lot, he's been around just long enough for her to remember his voice.

There's a general swell of hummed agreement. Everyone present - Maeve, Yumi, and Osterby - know. They've been there. Over and over again.

There's a beat of silence, and then Yumi says, "My first death, I ran right into a very large Draugr. It uh. Was a lot stronger than I thought it would be." She doesn't look up from her fingers, where she's flicking sparks of electricity back and forth, but the movement slows as the memory runs through her mind.

Osterby looks up from the book in his own hands, and thinks for a moment. "Probably mismanaged corruption."

And every blood mage in the room groans in unison.

"A few weeks ago," Mooney adds, face somewhere between horror and amusement and sheer bafflement, "I resurrected only to realize that I'd done so in a locked room and I had to literally slit my own wrists in order to die so I could resurrect somewhere less stupid."

Hands go up. All of theirs - all of them have done this. Death means nothing. Death is as impermanent as dreams. As sleep. As feeling safe.

 

* * *

 

She's walking out of a convenience store loaded down with iced coffee and energy drinks when her phone buzzes. It takes longer than she'd like to shove all of the drinks into her bag and struggle the phone out of her pocket - only to find that the text _isn't_ from Maeve, as she'd been expecting.

_Inanna: Just watched Osterdie get shitkicked by a giant Ak'ab. You two should start a club. Call that shit Team Dead Red or something._

 

* * *

 

She wakes up in the well, and is glad that the filth doesn't come through with her. But still she's underground, and the filth is everywhere, and she's going to have to run through it (and past those fucking Enderthings) again to get back to the rest of the group. And to Klein. Kicking his ass was going to be so satisfying…  


* * *

 

She wakes up in the well and lays there for a moment and wonders if she'd missed anything, or if she'd successfully (if accidentally) managed to get the attention of every single creature in the entire Orochi housing project.

 

* * *

  

She wakes up in the well and climbs to her feet, groaning, glad that her body didn't hurt after being clawed to death by a filth beast.

 

* * *

 

She wakes up in the well. She wakes up in the well. She wakes up in the well.

 

* * *

 

Rhii lays in the well and stares at the clouded sky and thinks - never in her life did she think she would _lose track of the times she'd died._ It had become a joke, by now, far beyond death losing meaning.  

It takes a long moment before she moves, and even then, she only reaches for her phone to send a single text.

_Osterby, mate, at this rate I'm going to bloody well get us club shirts._

 

 


End file.
